


You Keep Coming Back

by orphan_account



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Fawnlock, M/M, Swearing, Urination, and a foul mouth, he gardens to help with his stress levels but it doesn't really work, john has a massive temper, marking territory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-17
Updated: 2013-11-17
Packaged: 2018-01-01 21:55:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1049016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>morfiantra: John finding a little fawn in the woods, all alone and left without a mother, taking the little one in and bottle feeding it. He watches the fawn grow into a strong animal until one day he comes home and a young, attractive man with dark hair and antlers is sitting on his bed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Keep Coming Back

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bennyslegs](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bennyslegs/gifts).



> Because bennyslegs innocently reblogged morfiantra's post on tumblr and suddenly fawnlock wordvomit happened.

John was so busy cursing his cane, he almost tripped right over the tiny bundle of overlong legs curled in the middle of the path. He froze, breathed deep, and tugged his walking stick out from under the roots where it had gotten wedged. The bundle stirred, unfolding to peer up at him with one liquid black eye. John looked around. He was perfectly alone, and there was no sign of a mother nearby. He looked back at the fawn. It was tiny - it couldn’t be more than a handful of days old. 

"Sorry, little one," he murmured, backing away slowly. Maybe the mother would be back. "I’ll just let you be."

He was ten or twenty steps back the way he’d come when he stopped. His breath frosted in the air around him as he leaned against his cane, something tight and hot in his chest keeping him from walking away. With a silent groan, he turned back around. The fawn was nearly invisible at this distance, the dark fur and white spots blending in with the frosty earth of the woodland path. A weak mid-morning sun filtered down, casting winter-thin shadows across the fawn’s back. It looked so alone. 

_Just like me._

With a muffled curse, he limped back down the path. The fawn hardly stirred when he knelt beside it, manfully arranging his bad leg on the frozen ground. With a careful touch, holding his breath, John rested a hand on the fawn’s back. Its fur was thin and patchy in places, and underneath the skin was chilled.

"You, my friend, were born far too early. It’s not even March, yet." He moved his hand in a gentle stroking pattern, feeling the taut quivering in the fawn’s back and limbs. But it made no move to run away. "Where’s your mama, then?"

Of course it couldn’t answer. John scowled, but the knot in his chest pulled tighter and he blew out a restless sigh. 

The fawn weighed almost nothing when he picked it up, its twig-thin legs slip-sliding from his arms. It was still tense, but no longer quivering. John suppressed the irrational urge to wrap his scarf around its neck and headed down the trail, head bent against the stiff February breeze, now laced with a few bitter flakes. As he walked, the fawn made a little whuffling noise and buried its cold nose under John’s ear. He muffled a curse and kept going.

Behind him, in the middle of the path, his walking stick lay forgotten. In a few hours it would be buried under snow.

* * *

 "Come on then, silly beast. You'd better not shit on my bed." John glared at it suspiciously and backed away. The fawn blinked a few times, looking around at its new location. It struggled a bit, trying to get its legs under itself, and subsided, its little pointed face somehow looking weary. John's heart broke a little more. "Bastard," he said, not without affection, and went to find some milk.

The cottage had belonged to his great-aunt, and he'd only discovered she'd passed it on to him in her will when he returned from Aghanistan. She'd kept a few nanny goats in her time, now long gone, but a little rummaging in the dilapidated goat-shed unearthed a large glass bottle with a rubber nipple attached. He filled it with the milk he got from his distant neighbor, who kept a twenty-head herd of Guernsey milkers, and returned to his bedroom. The fawn was curled up again, nose tucked under its little fluff of a tail. John dragged a dusty old afghan in from the couch and tucked the fawn in. It blinked awake, eyes fastening on him. It must have recognized him, because it let out a feeble "Meh!" sound and thrust its nose under John's armpit.

"Hey! Stop that!" John pushed its head away from his body and toward the bottle. It sniffed the rubble nipple distrustfully, but latched on with a little coaxing on John's part. When it finished the first bottle, John went to make it another; but by the time he returned, it was well and truly asleep, sprawled in the blankets and making huffy little snoring noises into his pillow.

John bit his lip. "I guess you're going to need a name."

* * *

 

He took his time about it. He didn't want to name a creature that was going to die on him as soon as he got attached. But one week passed, then two, and the little fawn was only growing bigger and stronger - well, mostly stronger. He was still tiny, but he was learning to walk reliably, and had discovered that it was great fun to come up behind John when he wasn't paying attention and headbutt him right in the arse. John always swatted him away, but soon the fawn learned to skip out of the way, eyes huge and glittering like he was laughing at John. 

The fawn's only other distinguishing characteristic apart from his size was the top of his head. The fur grew a little longer there, and a cowlick on the bump of his forehead made it curl in a thick, swirling curlique. "Curlytop" was too childish for John to bear, so he took out some ancient baby name books at the dusty library down the road and came up with "Sherlock" instead. 

It was a very satisfying name, especially when shouted at full volume through the entire cabin. There were two kinds of " _Sherlock!!_ " The first was usually in response to some harmless trick, like John's painstaking attempt at a domino replica of the Tardis getting knocked down, or a path of crumbs leading to a torn and empty breadbag. It was laced with annoyance and longsuffering patience, and often resulted in a giddy Sherlock leaping and skittering through the cottage to wherever John was, butting him playfully as if to say "See? See? Aren't I the cleverest little fawn you ever saw?" 

The second kind was less playful. It tended to originate from a puddle of urine on the kitchen floor, or a pane of glass broken to let snow accumulate on the rug. It was strained and sharp, and took a few repeats before Sherlock would slink into view, head low and tail tucked firmly between his legs. John would melt a bit, but insist on giving a lecture anyway. And when Sherlock looked so repentant and miserable he could hardly stand it, John would take him by one ear and tug him gently into the bedroom, where they would curl up together in a forgiving pile of arms and too-long legs. The bed was their sanctuary, their safe place. Even as Sherlock started to grow, John kept letting him sleep there at night, curled in a snug ball on the other side of the mattress. It just didn't feel right to force him out of the bedroom. 

* * *

 

As spring broke over them, Sherlock spent more and more time outside, running hither and thither and getting into all sorts of trouble. John was kept so busy looking after him that he never remembered about his limp or his cane. Time passed quickly, and one day John was stroking the top of Sherlock's head in the midsummer warmth when he felt little hard knubs just to the front of his huge, soft ears. John prodded at them, fascinated, until Sherlock pulled away with a huff and stalked away to nibble at his marigolds.

"Those are poisonous, you prat," John called lazily. Sherlock just flicked his tail at him and chomped the leaves.

* * *

 

Fall came far too soon, and with it Sherlock's full growth. He'd more than tripled in size from the pathetic bundle John had first found on the snowy ground earlier that year, and had a respectable four points sprouting from the curlique top of his head. The spots had faded completely, leaving a thick, glossy coat of russet-red fur in its place. His fluff-tail had grown into a sleek foot-long flash of white that gleamed whenever he bounded around the yard. Standing upright on his strong, wiry legs, Sherlock topped John by a few inches, and that was  _without_ the antlers. 

As autumn drew on, though, other changes started happening. Sherlock's antlers had grown a fine fuzz, and he spent endless hours pacing and rubbing them against the lilacs, the garden paths, the house. John chased him away multiple times, shouting and waving his arms until Sherlock sprinted away; but still the rubs kept appearing, until it looked like the siding's green paint was growing bald spots. 

One morning, John emerged from his squash bed to find Sherlock staring, stock-still, at an elegant doe that had emerged from the fringes of the woods. John held his breath, watching. Some unseen signal seemed to pass between them, and then suddenly Sherlock was tearing across the field in huge, elegant bounds. The doe turned, flicked her tail in a flirt, and disappeard into the woods. 

"Bloody hell," John sighed. He tipped a few bulging acorn squash into a sack and twisted the top in a loose knot for storage, feeling a heaviness settle over his shoulders. "He's a wild thing," he reminded himself as he toed off his boots at the door and went to make a cuppa. "You knew he couldn't stay forever."

It was hard to fall asleep in an empty bed. He tossed and turned, and just when he'd managed to drift off, he was awakened by a familiar scraping sound on the front door. "Fucking animal," he said, stomping in bare feet to the door to let Sherlock in. But the weight on his chest was gone, and when he curled up in bed with that wild thing, he dropped off almost immediately, warmth at his side and a cold, wet nose under his ear.

* * *

 

The first snowfall came early, leaving John scrambling to save his late autumn vegetables from freezing. The middle of November was a flurry of harvesting and canning. Sherlock was gone often, but he always came back - usually in time for supper, because John had never been able to break the habit of feeding him people food - and John soon lost his fear that Sherlock would leave him. 

The rut was in full swing, and the fuzz was gone, leaving Sherlock's antlers sleek and bone-cold. Gradually, Sherlock left off running into the woods first thing in the morning, and started taking out his mating aggression on John. His first attempts at headbutts were deceptively gentle, always careful around John's tender stomach and unprotected head. But soon John caught on enough that Sherlock could rush him headlong in the yard, and John would grab his antlers and tussle with him in the shallow drifts of snow, kicking up mud and shriveled grass until he was gasping with laughter and Sherlock's rough, barking snorts echoed against the side of the house. 

Sherlock tried once -  _once_ \- to mark his territory. John came out of the kitchen to find Sherlock standing astride the living room rug, legs spread and antlered head high, pissing on the ragged knap. John about damn near lost his mind. He shouted at Sherlock and chased him out of the house, dragged the stinking rug out into the snow, and undid his zip, pissing on the rug and back in a thin yellow trail to the doorstep until his bladder was empty.

"This is  _my house_ , Sherlock, understand?" he yelled, while Sherlock watched from around the woodpile with one large, perturbed eye. "This is  _my fucking territory_! I am the alpha male here, I am the fucking king of this little herd! Okay?"

Then he slammed the door, calmed down, and let Sherlock back in in time for dinner.

* * *

 

December came, and with it freezing, howling Scottish winds that made Sherlock cower under the bed. Apparently he didn't like winter. Because of the antlers he still hadn't shed, he could only fit his body underneath; his fluttering tail poked out of one end, and his head out of the other, quaking and miserable. John, bundled up for a grocery trip into town before the storm hit, spent half an hour trying to coax him out before giving up and dropping the ratty, hairy afghan over Sherlock's head.

"Be good," he shouted, and stepped out into the cold.

It took longer than he'd wanted. The sun was already nearing the horizon by the time he pulled into the goat shed, now a tiny garage just big enough for his beat-up Ford Anglia. He ran across the yard, shoulders hunched against the thick flakes swirling down, and forced his way into the cottage; the whole house rattled as the door slipped from his hands and slammed shut in the wind.

"Bloody buggering fuck," he muttered, and dumped the groceries and emergency supplies on the kitchen table. It was very quiet. He unwrapped his scarf from his neck, listening. "Sherlock? You still here?"

Not really expecting an answer, he shrugged out of his coat and walked into the bedroom to see if Sherlock was still cowering under the bed.

He stopped short. There was a _man_ sleeping in his bed. A naked man. Or so John assumed, though it was hard to tell with the ratty afghan pulled up around his legs and waist. His skin was very pale and smooth, with dark brown discoloring on his shoulder, down his arm, and all along the supple curve of his spine. His dark, curly head was buried in Sherlock's pillow, and there were antlers brushing the headboard. John hovered in the doorway and stared. 

He must have made some sort of noise, though, because one of the man's ears twitched - a long, furry, deer-like ear - and he rolled over onto his back with all the languid ease of someone who wasn't  _a complete stranger sleeping in his bed._ John swallowed. Whoever he was, the stranger was bloody gorgeous. Ice-pale eyes blinked at him sleepily from across the mound of blankets, and a generous, bowed mouth curved into a smile.

"Hello, John."


End file.
